Page:Aspects of nature in different lands and different climates; with scientific elucidations (IA b29329668 0002).pdf/154

 *[Footnote: North of Africa, in Spain, and Portugal. Erica vagans and E. arborea also belong to the two opposite coasts of the Mediterranean: the first is found in North Africa, near Marseilles, in Sicily, Dalmatia, and even in England; the second in Spain, Italy, Istria, and in the Canaries." (Klotsch on the Geographical Distribution of species of Erica with persistent corollas, MSS.) The common heather, Calluna vulgaris, is a social plant covering large tracts from the mouth of the Scheldt to the western declivity of the Ural. Beyond the Ural, oaks and heaths cease together: both are entirely wanting in the whole of Northern Asia, and throughout Siberia to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Gmelin (Flora Sibirica, T. iv. p. 129) and Pallas (Flora Rossica, T. i. Pars 2, p. 58) have expressed their astonishment at this disappearance of the Calluna vulgaris,—a disappearance which, on the eastern declivity of the Ural Mountains, is even more sudden and decided than might be inferred from the expressions of the last-named great naturalist. Pallas says merely: "ultra Uralense jugum sensim deficit, vix in Isetensibus campis rarissime apparet, et ulteriori Sibiriæ plane deest." Chamisso, Adolph Erman, and Heinrich Kittlitz, have found Andromedas indeed in Kamtschatka, and on the North West coast of America, but no Calluna. The accurate knowledge which we now possess of the mean temperature of several parts of Northern Asia, as well as of the distribution of the annual temperature into the different seasons of the year, affords no sort of explanation of the cessation of heather to the east of the Ural Mountains. Joseph Hooker, in a note to his Flora Antarc-*]*